Shades of White
by Tierfal
Summary: The mind is a sanctum; the heart is a wasteland -- Near, in six moments. Six: It was quiet in the small cemetery.
1. Not Yet

**NOT YET**

Near has been waiting all day for this moment—not in an anticipatory way, but as a matter of plain expectation neatly underlined with certainty.

Underlined twice, in black pen.

Matt is still wearing what he put on this morning, denim shorts and a striped polo shirt, even though it's well after midnight. His hands are dirty, his knees are scuffed, and he probably knows that wearing the goggles in the dark won't hide the tear-streaks on his face.

He pauses a few feet away to push his high tops off, one at a time, each with the opposite foot. He takes two steps closer and then stops again, waiting, hesitating, tentative, because his world has changed, and nothing is safe. Nothing is sacred.

Near nods once. He doesn't insult the other boy with a smile.

Matt peels back the white blanket and the white sheet and climbs in under them. He is gangly and bony and unwieldy, and if Near hadn't seen the way he moves like mercury after the soccer ball, he'd think Matt was made entirely of elbows. Sharp elbows and knobby knees.

He'll fill in a little in the next few years, Near thinks. Someone will find more pieces and add them to this frame. With the great blue eyes, the copper-carnelian hair, and those cheekbones, Near imagines he'll be striking.

But not now. Not yet.

Now, Matt is a broken boy balled up and discarded, seeking refuge under Near's warm down comforter.

"He's not coming back," Matt says, his voice rattling in the emptiness. "Is he?"

"I don't think so," Near answers, and he wishes it was a lie. He wishes he had something to give, anything, though he knows very well that nothing in his power will change it, fix it, take it back.

Matt's dirty fingers curl against his dirty palms. No one has told him to take a bath. No one will be telling him anything, Near projects, for at least a week.

"I'd never leave him," Matt whispers.

"I know," Near replies.

"I need him." Matt seems to get smaller.

Near opens his arms, and Matt pushes himself forward to settle within them.

"He needs you, too," Near tells him. "Pretty soon he'll realize how much."

Matt's dirty hands are warm where they're clenched in Near's white shirt, and the plastic rims of his goggles are cold where they brush Near's white cheek.

"How soon?" he mumbles.

"I don't know, Matt," Near answers quietly. "He's awfully stupid for someone so smart."

Softly, Matt starts to cry again, and Near hugs him gently as he does. It's better that he let it go. It's better that he hollow himself out. He can put something else in that space for a while, the space that belongs to Mello.

That vacated space will always belong to Mello, and when they meet again—which Near knows they will, somehow—he will inhabit it again.

Matt shoves his goggles onto his forehead and scrubs a dirty hand across his eyes.

He'll be Mello's again.

But not now. Not yet.


	2. Justice

**JUSTICE**

It's really not about justice anymore.

He tells them that it is, and that's what he projects in his vast gray eyes as he gazes almost imploringly into their faces, because that's what they need to hear. That's what they need to believe in. Behind their badges and their certificates stands a woman wearing a blindfold, a scale in one hand, and they rely upon her. They need that.

Near considers idly that perhaps it isn't properly _L_-ish to dismiss the moral grounds in favor of the more practical motivation, but it's with an unpracticed detachment that he decides not to worry, because, at the steel and granite heart of things, it is about L.

It's about L, and it's about Kira, who killed him.

It's about taking that fucker down and grinding his face into the cesspit-altar he's built to his own ego.

It's about revenge.

Near doesn't care who he has to lie to, take advantage of, or outright sacrifice to get there. He's going to win. And Kira is going to die.

The angel of death isn't very pretty, so Near dresses her up, blindfolds her, and pushes a set of scales into her skeletal fingers.

Near enough.


	3. Faces

**FACES**

L had it right all along. Everything's easier when they can't see your face.

Stephen Loud—that is, Gevanni—is a good, a decent, and a useful man, but Near sees what he's seeing, and he watches a good, decent, useful, susceptible man begin to doubt. As for Halle—she's on the cusp of thirty, and Near would bet his right hand that she resists a desperate urge to mother him, but she guards her expression as though it hides government secrets. Rester has accepted it, gracefully, with a tremor of quasi-paternal concern. Gevanni is the only one eager and impetuous enough to let his emotions flicker across his face, and it is there that Near can watch the skepticism stealing in.

He's a child.

He looks it, acts it, confirms it and corroborates it every time he picks up a robot or a figurine. He thrives on physical things, on repetitive motion, and sends his brain whirring onto an equally logical, linear, mechanical track, all blinking lights and assembly lines until the product emerges, flawless.

Gevanni sees him playing with toys.

His observations, analyses, and inevitable results don't destroy the doubt; they merely complicate it. Gevanni—and the others, behind their masks—don't know what to think of him now. He's a monster, a mutant, a hybrid. He's got that mind and these little fingers, these sock-sheathed feet, this eerie white hair and these wide gray eyes. This upturned nose and this twitching need for motion, for plastic, for mental floss he can manipulate with these tiny hands.

Mello has his chocolate and his rosary, snapping the former, clutching the latter when no one's there to look. Matt has his endless array of video games, any configuration of buttons that a man could desire waiting at his itching fingertips.

L didn't want people to see the ice cream, the cookies, the candies, and the cake. L didn't want them to know the price of the mind beyond. L didn't want them to realize just how near genius and lunacy sit, their shoulders touching, their whispered voices mingling in the dark, in the front row of the hollow theater of the world that Near inhabits.

L was right to hide.

Mello seeks Mary, Our Mother. Near wants Notre Dame.


	4. Unexpected

**UNEXPECTED**

Well, this is unexpected.

Near obviously didn't think it would be the same boy he'd known then, but neither did he anticipate that Mello would take his miniature Mafioso costuming quite so seriously.

That is to say, he wasn't prepared to see what he remembers as a bony fifteen-year-old boy emerge, phoenix-like, from the smoking wreckage, dressed in the latest off the racks at Dominatrix Express.

Then again, Mello has always taken great joy in obliterating things, many things, indiscriminately—towers of blocks, intricate train tracks, puzzles just short of completion. Custom and convention have never escaped his attention. He does it—as he has always done it—for the power, for that unique sense of control that comes from looking at the splintered pieces on the floor, and Near doesn't doubt that this weird power game of his factored into the way he jammed a thumb down on the detonator and didn't look back.

Impressive how fast this leather-clad creature has found Halle. Near calculated only a fifteen percent chance that they would be previously acquainted, though God knows how Halle is, as does Near. Perhaps he should have adjusted to twenty.

He squints at the lowest screen, closest to where he crouches within the almost protective loop of the train track, and tries to gauge the damage from the blast, but Mello's hood is raised, and the constant floating of the feathers wreaks hell with the cameras' sights. Of course it does; Mello wouldn't risk being recorded. He would have thought about this; idly Near estimates an eighty percent likelihood that his having cautioned his team about all this today was purely coincidental. Mello had already moved by then.

The world is a serendipitous place.

Halle's face is easier to read. Near often feels sorry for Halle; she's a beautiful woman, and an assertive one, which repels men faster than the prospect of housework and a chick flick reward. Her loneliness drives her to desperation, and in her desperation she verges on pitiful.

She is not, however, without her pride, and being led, subjugated, into her employer's stronghold, with proof of her weakness putting a gun barrel to her smooth, pale hair, she seethes, aware for once of what this life has made her. Of what she has let herself become.

Near glances over the other screens as the door breathes open, and Gevanni and Rester raise their guns with a reassuringly energetic efficiency. Mello tosses his hood back, shameless, and Near decides that there is an ninety-four percent chance that Matt has strolled onto the scene. There is an eighty-nine percent chance he has told Mello that the scar is beautiful. There is a ninety-six percent chance he believes it.

Matt is incisively intelligent, but in a different way than the two once-boys in this room, silent but for the panting. Matt is about people, about life, about the interwoven web of things, not about a single track of thought to be traced intently and at all costs. Mello has always been Matt's axis. Near watched Matt gather himself together when the core of his existence disappeared, discovering quickly that Matt was stronger than he'd ever thought possible, but the broken star of his universe is not going to change. Matt needs something to orbit. He needs someone to love.

Near, on the other hand, needs people to use.

He almost laughs aloud when Mello screams that he won't be a tool. As if the poor child has a choice.

They're his knights, Matt and Mello are. Or perhaps Mello is his queen, sharp and cold and entirely unexpected. Matt is more of a rook, and Rester, too—straight-shooters, quite literally, whose consistency is reliable. Halle and Gevanni run the diagonals as his bishops.

He almost grins thinking of what Mello would say. _You're my queen, Mello._ Amusing.

"I'll see you at the finish line," Mello remarks, breaking the chocolate with his teeth.

Near smiles, index finger twisting itself into his hair. They're on the same side. Or, rather, Mello is on his side, whether he wills it or no.

The only question, of course, is how many pieces will be left standing.


	5. Stupid

**STUPID**

Despite the countless adages about books' covers and taking things at face value, people think him naïve. With the white hair, the great eyes, and this damned inconvertible form, he supposes he can't blame them. He's a metaphor-monger's dream come true, symbolic quite by accident, particularly blatant when juxtaposed with the concentrated oblivion that is Mello.

He knows what the world is. He knows how it operates. He knows that the planet is populated, overpopulated, overwhelmed by cannibals and carnivores. It goes without saying that he isn't stupid.

Which is why he raises the .45, squints through the thick plastic of the protective lenses, and puts six bullets into the dark torso silhouette printed on the paper target.

There are six small holes right where the heart would be, a few of them merging in their proximity.

He sets the gun down, pries the glasses up to wipe a drizzle of cool sweat from beneath the curve of his eyebrow, and adjusts the earmuffs for better coverage.

The sun's going down. Halle came by an hour ago to tell them that everything is prepared, except of course for the notebook Gevanni will continue forging diligently late into the night. Behind him, Rester shifts impatiently, and Near knows he should concede to return to headquarters now, but he doesn't want today to end.

Everything hinges on tomorrow. If something goes wrong, they're all dead.

Near picks up the 9 mm, aims, and fires six more bullets.

No, he's not stupid.

And he doesn't believe in luck.


	6. Ghosts

_Author's Note: I actually wrote this one much earlier than any of the others, but it stewed for a long time as I tried to figure out whether or not I liked it. I believe this was my first time writing Near, and I really wasn't sure about it, though there are things I like about it now. XD__  
_

* * *

**GHOSTS**

It was quiet in the small cemetery, the world outside muffled by tactful hedges and the enterprising ivy that strangled the wrought-iron fencing, a disease spreading delicate tendrils to distribute its inconspicuous venom.

Would it infect him? He had long ago perfected the art of guarding himself from contagion, but he tried never to underestimate an enemy, be it a blond-haired boy or a heart-shaped leaf, emerald ringed with a butter-yellow border.

He had thought about white roses, but white was his color—or gray, perhaps; it was hard to tell these days. He'd done things, thought things, proposed things, chosen ash over snow. He could no longer determine how much of it was his fault, how much of it was his susceptibility, and how much should be blamed on a world that had no place for innocence. A world that buried innocence in bright-eyed boys and then buried them, marking the spot with a stone as if someone might heed the warning.

The summary of it was the deep, warm red petals of the rose cradled in his curled fingers. Red was Mello's color—violent and vital, relentless and unforgiven. Mello's red was the red of the seething center of the flame, just beyond where the heart of it coalesced momentarily into the electric blue of his hardened eyes. Mello was fire, in all the ways that counted.

By that token, he was ice, and he knew it. He knew how people looked at him; he'd seen their eyes narrow slightly as they sought in vain to understand the gleaming silence of the crystallized winter at his core. He'd always been that way. He couldn't be bothered, couldn't be shaken, couldn't be moved. He'd closed himself off a long time ago, in a past so mythically distant from the present that he couldn't even remember when it was or how he'd gone about sealing his armor shut. It seemed strange, now, to think that there must have been a single, isolated moment in which he decided not to get hurt anymore.

He had always envied Mello's hot blood and blazing eyes, though there was never a moment that was right to admit it. He had reveled in it, though—the sick jealousy that had bubbled, dark and viscous, in the pit of his stomach—simply because he could detect it so distinctly. Because it stung.

It all came back to what he was jealous of in the first place, which was the fact that Mello felt things, and felt them overwhelmingly.

He had tried to be like that—in small, inconspicuous ways, so that no one would take notice of his bizarre endeavor, not that anyone ever noticed much about him to start with. He was the quiet one with the troupe of robots and the rubber duck armada and the endless train tracks curling like mist to settle and solidify on the carpet. That was all they saw, all they knew, and all they needed to know.

When, after the musing resolution, he rushed through the next mathematics exam, nothing happened. He deliberately botched a question on its successor, but he wasn't angry with himself—of course not; he'd done it on purpose; that was the whole point. He tried hating people by picking out their flaws and attempting to find them progressively more odious, but that, too, had a rational explanation, which was that humanity was, by nature and definition, imperfect.

Then he'd tried falling in love, but he didn't know how.

So when a few slashes of a malicious pen felled all but three members of the SPK, of _his_ SPK; when the bodies crumpled with lifeless eyes; when his hands slipped and dice rained to the floor; when they _died_, and his composure shattered for the loss of _them_, these people who had set their worlds to circling his, not for the loss of the _game_—it was… a relief. It was a relief to feel something so sharp and sudden and wretched and _real_, to feel it with every fiber of his being and his body, to want to curl up in a corner with his eyes squeezed shut, with his hands pressed over his ears, until it all went away.

The night Mello died, he cried like a child.

He couldn't remember the last time he had done that. It had been cathartic, somehow—cleansing, and wracking, and pure. As the salt had dried in crusty trails on his cheeks and his rippling, gasping breaths had slowly evened out, he had reconciled with it, at least a little. Because even in a world where Kira could reign, even in a world where L could die, there was enough justice left to let Matt and Mello go out at the same time.

That, at least, was kind.

He turned the rose over in his fingers, the weak light seeming a little warmer where it met the petals' curves.

They'd called him a ghost, the other children had—behind his back, mostly. He'd supposed it was an inevitable consequence of his colorless hair and his dead eyes, of the loose white fabric that draped over his form, and he'd long since forgiven them. Even in a house that drew the different together, children had to pick specific anomalies out in others, had to identify the oddities and belabor them. It was their way of understanding things.

He felt like a ghost, drifting through a world so often too simplistic to be of interest, lacking the fire and the warmth that purportedly characterized mankind.

He set the rose down at the marble angel's feet and gazed at her where she stooped, welcoming arms open, gently bent to enclose all and sundry in a mother's unconditional embrace. He twisted a finger in his hair. If he were to purchase a rose bush—no; two rose bushes—he could plant them on either side, and there would be red roses all of the time, every moment, to banish the cold.

Ghost, was he? The gate creaked as he pushed it securely shut behind him.

He smiled. He was in good company.


End file.
